Running on Google Colab

[will-holley]

Hello - I am excited to try out your library on a Google Colaboratory Notebook. However, I am running into difficultly setting it up, having tried both the Linux and GCP instructions. Has this been attempted by yourself or others, and if so is it possible? Thanks!

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Video encoding library initialization failed, encoding features are not available.
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[ERROR] (MainThread) Initial setup failed, see errors above.
[ERROR] (MainThread) Geometry setup failed.
[ERROR] (MainThread) Camera setup failed.
Exception in thread Thread-5:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.6/threading.py", line 916, in _bootstrap_inner
    self.run()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/plotoptix/npoptix.py", line 219, in run
    assert self._is_scene_created, "Scene is not ready, see initialization messages."
AssertionError: Scene is not ready, see initialization messages.

[ERROR] (MainThread) Raytracing output startup timed out.

[robertsulej]

Hi Will,

Yes, I tried Colab. They have too old drivers installed, please see this issue: https://github.com/googlecolab/colabtools/issues/620

I was able to properly install all the prerequisites, so we are just waiting for the driver update. It could be a perfect environment for sharing PlotOptiX.

[robertsulej]

Oh, wait a second! I just checked again:

Wed Sep 4 08:41:42 2019
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | NVIDIA-SMI 430.40 Driver Version: 418.67 CUDA Version: 10.1 | |-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

That one should work, I'll try it now.

EDIT: Well... not that good. I am landing on K80, which is too old architecture in turn. Compute capability 5.0 (Maxwell) is required. Previously I had more luck and got Tesla T4 assigned...

EDIT 2: Got T4, there is a problem with configuration and the library cannot recognize the gpu. Working on it...

[robertsulej]

Ok, it seems that the problem is with the OptiX library. I am discussing this issue here. If there is a workaround I'll fix it with the next release. If not, we'll have to wait again for the driver update in Google Colab and I'll also switch to updated OptiX libraries.

[will-holley]

Hi Robert - Thanks for the expedient and extensive follow up!

[boulos]

Btw, Colab just updated to 11.2, and I made an end-to-end example:

https://github.com/googlecolab/colabtools/issues/620#issuecomment-792170689

A lot of the set vs update stuff ends up being fairly annoying in the colab setting (an "update or set" would be nice, or just have things like set_data work even if a previous value exists).

Thanks for plotoptix!

[robertsulej]

Yup, set/update defenitively to be changed. I'll improve on that as soon as I finish current project.

[robertsulej]

I came back to check if/how Colab is working. They still don't have the recent drivers, but with a compatible plotoptix release everything seems ok. Here is the working notebook. I'll check from time to time and maintain it up to date.